Portraits

Elaine Feinstein has always written most passionately about people. In this intimate collection, she remembers friends she has loved, writers she knows, and literary figures from the past. She writes of the Russian poet Bella Akhmadulna with tender admiration; the East End poet Emanuel Litvinoff, at work in his Bloomsbury flat; and Masha Enzenberger, who brought Feinstein into the Russian world of Marina Tsvetaeva. Feinstein imagines Raymond Chandler, Isaac Rosenberg, and Sylvia Plath, and she delights in Joseph Roth's melancholy wit and Disraeli's nerve. There are a few sardonic self-portraits as well. In the last poem, "Death and the Lemon Tree," she finds a compelling image for the privilege of continuing to write into old age.